Results for “YouTube” 1354 found
In Conversation with Próspera CEO Erick Brimen & Vitalia Co-Founder Niklas Anzinger
During my visit to Prospera, one of Honduras’ private governments under the ZEDE law, I interviewed Prospera CEO Erick Brimen and Vitalia co-founder Niklas Anzinger. I learned a lot in the interview including the real history of the ZEDE movement (e.g. it didn’t begin with Paul Romer). I also had not fully appreciated the power of reciprocity stacking.
Companies in Prospera have the unique option to select their regulatory framework from any OECD country, among others. Erick Brimen elaborated in the podcast how this enables companies to do normal, OECD approved, things in Prospera which literally could not be done legally anywhere else in the world.
…so in the medical world for instance you have drugs that are approved in some countries but not others and you have medical practitioners that are licensed in some countries but not the others and you have medical devices approved in some countries but not others and there’s like a mismatch of things that are approved in OECD countries but there’s no one location where you can say hey if they’re approved in any country they’re approved here. That is what Prosper is….Our hypothesis is that just by doing that we can leapfrog to a certain extent and it’s got nothing to do with the wild west or doing weird things.
…so here so you can have a drug approved in the UK but not in the US with a doctor licensed in the US but not in the UK with a medical device created in Israel but not yet approved by the FDA following a procedure that has been say innovated in Canada, all of that coming together here in Prospera.
Friday assorted links
1. Virginia stadium deal might be dead.
2. More blue cities are backing anti-crime measures.
3. Mark Skousen reviews GOAT for Economic Affairs.
4. Lengthy JEL survey article on the productivity slowdown (AEA gate).
5. Weak showers do not necessarily save water.
6. Tehzeeb live sessions (music from Pakistan).
7. The secret door is the new trend? (NYT)
Claude 3 Opus as economic analyst
Via Francis Santora, Hudson County, NJ.
What Ireland and Scotland are doing to their housing markets
From Kieran Lucid and Polysee:
The Black-Scholes-Merton Options Pricing Equation
A superb video on the history and mathematics of options pricing from Veritasium.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Dan Klein responds to my Casablanca review. Of course my view is that what Dan sees in the movie is also there.
2. Do standard error corrections exacerbate publication bias?
3. Mr. Beast as talent evaluator (short video).
4. My Bloomberg column on the very high value of open source software.
5. “What is Éire accelerationism and why does it matter?” A new podcast episode from David McWilliams.
The Maniac
I enjoyed Benjamin’s Labatut’s The Maniac. Conventionally regarded as a “biography” of John von Neumann but more accurately a series of short, quick vignettes, recollections, and reconstructions told by people around von Neumann and centered on the many ideas he touched, including the metaphysics of logic, quantum physics, the nuclear bomb, the meaning of rationality, the fundamental structure of life and especially artificial intelligence. The recollections are what might be called creative non-fiction; based on real life interviews but written as if the speaker were a novelist. For example, Feynman uniquely watching the first atomic test without goggles, but told even more vividly than Feynman told the story.
As Tyler noted, many of the stories will be familiar to MR readers, but a few were new to me. Sydney Brenner, for example, the Nobel prize winning molecular biologist who hypothesized and then proved the existence of messenger RNA reports with wonder and astonishment that von Neumann had earlier understood from theory alone how any such system must work.
Fear and awe in the presence of great intelligence is a running theme of the book. Polya famously described fearing von Neumann after seeing him solve a problem in minutes that he had worked on for decades (again the story is jeujed up in The Maniac to great effect.) Eugene Wigner who knew him from childhood and who himself won a Nobel prize in physics is “quoted” (recall this is fictionalized but based on the record):
It was a burden growing up so close to him. I often wonder if my horrific inferiority complex, which not even the Nobel prize has diminished in the slightest, is a product of having known von Neumann for the better part of my life.
…I knew Planck, von Laue, and Heisenberg, Paul Dirac was my brother-in-law, Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends, and Albert Einstein was a good friend too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Janos von Neumann. I remarked on this in the presence of those men, several times, and no one ever disputed me.
Only he was fully awake.
Another theme is the seemingly close relationship between rationality and insanity–Labatut develops this both in theory around Godel’s theorem but also in practice with the many rationalists who went crazy. What does this mean for artificial intelligence?
The MANIAC refers not to von Neumann but to von Neumann’s creation the Mathematical Analyzer Numerical Integrator and Automatic Computer Model, the first computer built using von Neumann’s architecture, which all computers use today. From the MANIAC we get to artificial intelligence and again the awe and fear. After Gary Kasparov loses to Deep Blue he become despondent and fearful, thinking that there must have been a human in the machine. Lee Sedol losing to AlphaGo and soon retiring thereafter. Ke Jie being annihilated by Master, the successor to AlphaGo and reporting “he is a god of Go. A god that can crush all who defy him.” And then the creators of AlphaGo take off the training wheels, they remove all the human games that constrained the earlier models to a foundation built on thousands of years of human knowledge and the result crushes the human-limited model.
We are reminded of what von Neumann said on his death bed when asked what would it take for a computer to begin to think and behave like a human being.
He took a very long time before answering, in a voice that was no louder than a whisper.
He said that it would have to understand language, to read, to write, to speak.
And he said that it would have to play, like a child.
The Maniac is a good read.
How I listen to music
Ian Leslie writes to me:
I’m wondering, have you ever done a post about how you listen to music? Hours per week, times of day, technologies, degree of multi-tasking, etc…and how you choose what to listen to at any given moment. I’d be interested.
I go to plenty of concerts, but that is for another post. And I’ve already written about satellite radio. As for home, I like to listen to music most of the time, noting that if I am writing a) the music doesn’t bother me, and b) I don’t necessarily hear that much of the music. A few more specific points:
1. I don’t like to listen to “rock music” (broadly construed) in the morning.
2. I won’t listen to Mahler, Bruckner, or Brahms in the morning. They are evening music.
3. Renaissance music is best either in the morning or the evening.
4. I don’t listen to much jazz at home any more, though I am no less keen to see a good jazz concert live. Having already spent a lot of time with the great classics, at current margins I am disillusioned with most “jazz as recorded music.”
4b. The same is true of most “world music,” if you will excuse the poorly chosen label. I do subscribe to Songlines, a world music magazine. I buy some of the recommendations on CD, but try out many more on YouTube or Spotify. That is my primary use of those services, at least for music. That is one case where I am sampling to see if I run across new sounds.
5. I don’t like earbuds and never use them.
6. Bach gets the most listening time.
7. For a classical piece I really like, I might own five or more recorded versions, occasionally running up to a dozen. Listening to a poor or even so-so recording of a very good piece is to me painful and to be avoided.
8. Contemporary classical music — which many people hate — gets plenty of listening time. Though not when Natasha is home. Some of those recordings, such as Helmut Lachenmann string quartets, seem to create problems for Spinoza, noting that he is rarely not at home. Perhaps they will be shelved for a few years.
9. I buy new classical music releases recommended by Fanfare, and occasionally from the NYT or Gramophone or elsewhere. As for “popular music” (a bad term), mostly I wait until December and then buy CDs extensively from various “best of the year” lists. I do some Spotify sampling then too, again from those lists.
10. The main stock of recorded music is kept in the basement. There is a separate shelf upstairs for what I am listening to actively at the moment. That shelf might have 200 or so CDs, with some of them scattered on tables, and with some LPs nearby as well.
11. Periodically I go down into the basement and choose which discs will be “re-promoted” to the active shelf upstairs. And if I am done listening to a disc, it goes down to the basement, with some chance of being re-promoted back to upstairs later.
12. If I don’t like a disc, I throw it out, as space constraints have become too binding. (It is cruel to give it away, and no one wants it anyway.) As time passes, I am throwing out more discs. For instance, I love Cuban music but I don’t lilsten to it on disc any more.
Overall, I view this system as optimized for getting to know a core repertoire. It is not optimized for browsing or random discovery. I feel I have a lot of discovery in my musical life, but it comes from reading and information inflow — both extensive — not from listening per se.
And to be clear, I am not suggesting that these methods are optimal for anyone else.
Thursday assorted links
1. Funny and rude map of Brazil.
2. Did Silicon Valley drive the stagnation problem?
3. Kind > nice.
4. Noah reviews Power and Progress.
5. Caribbean reading list: “You can judge your progress by continually listening to Lee Perry‘s music. If you can comprehend why his music best represents English Caribbean culture, then you are on your way.”
Tuesday assorted links
1. Museum Selfie-Takers Are Causing Damage by Backing Into Artworks.
2. New Zealand is now falling behind much of Eastern Europe.
4. More coverage of Bukele. Good piece.
5. How religious is Iran these days?
6. Paul Bloom on how to be a good podcast guest.
7. Peter Thiel talk at Harvard. Best part on Christianity and the Woke starts at about 28:00.
Give Innovation a Chance
Elizabeth Currid-Halkett writing in the NYTimes discusses her son’s muscular dystrophy and his treatment with the controversial gene-therapy Elevidys. Currid-Halkett, like many parents whose children have been treated with Elevidys, reports much better results than appear in the statistics.
On Aug. 29, [my son] finally received the one-time infusion. Three weeks later, he was marching upstairs and able to jump over and over. After four weeks, he could hop on one foot. Six weeks after treatment, Eliot’s neurologist decided to re-administer the North Star Ambulatory Assessment, used to test boys with D.M.D. on skills like balance, jumping and getting up off the floor unassisted. In June, Eliot’s score was a 22 out of 34. In the second week of October, it was a perfect 34 — that of a typically developing, healthy 4-year-old boy. Head in my hands, I wept with joy. This was science at its very best, close to a miracle.
…a narrow focus on numbers ignores the real quality-of-life benefits doctors, patients and their families see from these treatments. During the advisory committee meeting for Elevidys in May 2023, I listened to F.D.A. analysts express skepticism about the drug after they watched videos of boys treated with Elevidys swimming and riding bikes. These experts — given the highest responsibility to evaluate treatments on behalf of others’ lives — seemed unable to see the forest for the trees as they focused on statistics versus real-life examples.
Frankly, I side with the statistics. We don’t hear from the parents in the placebo group whose children also spontaneously made improvements.
Even though I side the statistics, I side with approval. Innovation is a dynamic process. It’s not surprising that the first gene therapy for DMD offers only modest benefits; you don’t hit a home run the first time at bat. But if the therapy isn’t approved, the scientists don’t go back to the drawing board and keep going. If the therapy isn’t approved, it dies and you lose the money, experience and learning by doing that are needed to develop, refine and improve.
Approval is not the end of innovation but a stepping stone on the path of progress. Here’s an example I gave earlier of the same principle. When we banned supersonic aircraft, we lost the money, experience and learning by doing needed to develop quieter supersonic aircraft. A ban makes technological developments in the industry much slower and dependent upon exogeneous progress in other industries.
You must build to build better.
Addendum: Peter Marks is the best and perhaps the most important director CBER has ever had. CBER, the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, is responsible for biological products, including vaccines and gene therapies. Marks has repeatedly pushed and sometimes overruled his staff in approving products like Elevidys. Marks named and was the driving force at the FDA behind Operation Warp Speed, a tremendous FDA success and break with tradition. Marks has been challenging the FDA’s conservative culture. I hope his changes survive his tenure.
Monday assorted links
1. YouTube interview with Brad Mehldau. Very good.
2. How much can embryonic selection boost IQ?
3. Ukraine drone update. And Master and Margarita movie is a big hit in Russia (NYT). Do you recall the final scene of the novel?
4. Cowen’s Second Law. Good thing there is a replication crisis.
5. Groq — blinding speed, I say bullet chess for LLMs! Here is one possible explanation for the speed.
Emergent Ventures winners, 32nd cohort
Anson Yu, Waterloo, telemetry devices that can detect compromised hardware devices to protect our electrical grid and other critical infrastructure.
Anshul Kashyap, Berkeley, neurotech and vision, to visit the Netherlands for work and research reasons.
Kieran Lucid, Dublin, Irish videos about YIMBY and aesthetics, at the site Polysee.
Matin Amiri, Antwerp, Afghanistan, and San Francisco (?), building digital clones.
Snowden Todd, USA and Honduras and South Korea, to write a book on South Korean fertility issues.
Anthony Jancso, Accelerate SF, San Francisco, for general career development.
Denisa Lepadatu, Romania and Bremen, trip to Prospera to pursue longevity research.
Jamie Rumbelow and Henry Dashwood, London, British company to ease land rights/permissions.
Anastasia Vorozhtsova, Columbia University, to study Russian education and the Russian state.
Rohan Selva-Radov, Oxford, general career development, and to develop a dating/matching service for young people.
Olga Yakimenko, Vienna, movie-making.
Rucha Benare, Dublin, Pune area, art and biology.
Brooke Bowman, San Francisco, Vibecamp.
Ruxandra Tesloianu, Cambridge/Romania, travel grant and career development, bio space, science, and meta-science.
Ukraine cohort:
Serhii Shadrin, to study at University of Chicago, and to study information manipulation and media.
Le Sallay Academy, school for Ukrainian refugees, including in France and Serbia, Sergey Kuznetsov and Aleka Molokova.
Here are previous winners of Emergent Ventures. Here is Nabeel’s software for querying about EV winners.
Trump’s threat to let Putin invade NATO countries
I don’t usually blog on “candidate topics,”or “Trump topics,” but a friend of mine asked me to cover this. As you probably know, Trump threatened to let NATO countries that failed to meet the two percent of gdp defense budget obligation fend for themselves against Putin (video here, with Canadian commentary). Trump even said he would encourage the attacker.
Long-time MR readers will know I am not fond of Trump, either as a president or otherwise. (And I am very fond of NATO.) But on this issue I think he is basically correct. Yes, I know all about backlash effects. But so many NATO members do not keep up serious defense capabilities. And for decades none of our jawboning has worked.
Personally, I would not have proceeded or spoken as Trump did, and I do not address the collective action problems in my own sphere of work and life in a comparable manner (“if you’re not ready with enough publications for tenure, we’ll let Bukele take you!” or “Spinoza, if you don’t stop scratching the couch, I won’t protect you against the coyotes!”). So if you wish to take that as a condemnation of Trump, so be it. Nonetheless, I cannot help but feel there is some room for an “unreasonable” approach on this issue, whether or not I am the one to carry that ball.
Even spending two percent of gdp would not get many NATO allies close to what they need to do (and yes I do understand the difference between defense spending and payments to NATO, in any case many other countries are falling down on the job). I strongly suspect that many of those nations just don’t have effective fighting forces at all, and in essence they are standing at zero percent of gdp, even if their nominal expenditures say hit 1.7 percent. Remember the report that the German Army trained with broomsticks because they didn’t have enough machine guns? How many of those forces are actually ready to fire and fight in a combat situation? It is far from obvious that the Ukraine war — a remarkably grave and destructive event — has fixed that situation.
The nations that see no need to have workable martial capabilities at all are a real threat to NATO, and yes this includes Canada, which shares a very large de facto Arctic border with Putin, full of valuable natural resources. Even a United States led by Nikki Haley cannot do all the heavy lifting here. What if the U.S. is tied down in Asia and/or the Middle East when further trouble strikes? That no longer seems like such a distant possibility. And should Western Europe, over time, really become “foreign policy irrelevant,” relative to the more easternmost parts of NATO? That too is not good for anybody.
With or without Trump’s remarks, we are likely on a path of nuclear proliferation, starting in Poland.
People talk about threats to democracy in Poland, and I am not happy they have restricted the power of their judiciary. But consider Germany. The country has given up its energy independence, it may lose a significant portion of its manufacturing base, its earlier economic strategy was to cast its lot with Russia and China, AfD is the #2 party there and growing, and the former east is politically polarized and illiberal, among other problems. Most of all, the country has lost its will to defend itself. That is in spite of a well-educated population and a deliberative political systems that in the more distant past worked well. You can criticize Trump’s stupid provocations all you want, but unless you have a better idea for waking Germany (and other countries) up, you are probably just engaging in your own mood affiliation. On this issue, “argument by adjective” ain’t gonna’ cut it.
The best scenario is that Trump raises these issues, everyone in Canada and Western Europe screams, they clutch their pearls and are horrified for months, but over time the topic becomes more focal and more ensconced in their consciousness. Eventually more Democrats may pick up the Trump talking points, as they have done with China. Perhaps three to five years from now that can lead to some positive action. And if they are calling his words “appalling and unhinged,” as indeed they are, well that is going to drive more page views.
The odds may be against policy improvement in any case, but by this point it seems pretty clear standard diplomacy isn’t going to work. I am just not that opposed to a “Hail Mary, why not speak some truth here?” approach to the problem. Again, I wouldn’t do it, but at the margin it deserves more support than it is getting. Of course it is hard for the MSM American intelligentsia to show any sympathy for Trump’s remarks, because his words carry the implication that spending more on social welfare has an unacceptably high opportunity cost. So you just won’t find much objective debate of the issues at stake.
If you’re worried about Trump encouraging Putin, that is a real concern but the nations on the eastern flank of NATO are all above two percent, Bulgaria excepted. Maybe this raises the chance that Putin is emboldened to blow up some Western European infrastructure? Make a move against Canada in the Arctic? I still could see that risk as panning out into greater preparedness, greater deterrence, and a better outcome overall. Western Europe of course has a gdp far greater than that of Putin’s Russia. they just don’t have the right values, in addition to not spending enough on defense.
So on this one Trump is indeed the Shakespearean truth-teller, and (I hope) for the better.
Nash’s Contributions to Mathematics
Nash won the Nobel prize in Economics for his 2-page proof of Nash equilibrium, among the slightest of his achievements. Nash’s truly staggering contributions were in his embedding theorems, according to Gromov “one of the main achievements of mathematics of the twentieth century”. In this excellent talk, Cédric Villani gives an accessible guide to these theorems for mere mortals. Villani is a Fields medal winner, a French politician, and a character, all of which adds to the talk.